What Does a ‘Good Time’ Look Like in the New Olympic Swimming Events?

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games (which are scheduled for 2021) will feature 3 new Olympic medal events in swimming: the men’s 800 free, women’s 1500 free, and mixed 400 medley relay.

The former two races, long overdue, now bring full alignment to the men’s and women’s Olympic schedules. While there has been limited ‘enthusiasm’ for the addition of more distance rises from the swimming public, they’ve generally been supported for what they stand for, which is unifying the schedules.

The mixed medley, on the other hand, has been much more polarizing, with some (including this author) liking the concept and the strategy that goes with it, while others have labeled it a “circus act” event. It fits in the IOC’s general strategy of experimenting with mixed-gender events first at the Youth Olympic level, and now increasingly at the Olympic level.

For swim fans, these new races joining the Olympic lineup means a new level of fluency. While interest in swimming besides the Olympics is growing, the Olympics are still the grandest of games, and events that are Olympic events inevitably receive more focus and attention.

Among this new fluency is getting better at knowing what times are ‘good’ in these races. ‘Good’ can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so we’ve just selected certain metrics from past major events and laid the times out below. This should start to form some picture of what times are ‘good’ on an Olympic scale.

What Happens when Events Become Olympic Events?

There’s another piece to this puzzle, of course. Even if events are World Championship events, until they’re Olympic events, they’re never going to have the full weight of the swimming populace. Coaches will tailor training to these events a little more, and further, there will be a cream-rising-to-the-top effect: a female swimmer whose natural gift would have been for the 1500, for example, might fight that nature to try and improve speed to be competitive in the 800, and live with the impact of that upon her natural endurance. In other cases, a true top-tier swimmer might just bypass the non-Olympic event altogether. We never, for example, saw Michael Phelps racing the 50 fly at the World Championships.

Let’s look at two case studies in this, in the two most recent events added to the Olympic schedule: the 50 free in 1988, and the 800 free relay in 1996.

Men’s 50 free:

• World Record going into the 1988 Olympic year: Tom Jager, 22.32
• World Record set at the Olympics: Matt Biondi, 22.14
• World Record after 1992 Olympics: Tom Jager, 21.81 (1990)

Tom Jager won the World Championship in the 50 free in 1986 with a time of 22.49. By 1990, after inclusion in the Olympic schedule, he had taken that record all the way to 21.81, a drop of .68 seconds.

That’s over a 3% time drop in 4 years.

That wasn’t an outlier either: it took a time of 23.03 to final at the 1986 World Championships, a 23.04 at the 1988 Olympic Games, and a 22.72 at the 1992 Olympic Games. That’s a 1.3% drop from 1988 to 1992 in the time required to final.

By comparison, in the men’s 100 free, the closest surrogate on the Olympic schedule, the time to final between 1988 and 1992 moved from 50.45 to 50.05 – an improvement rate of about half as much as the 50 free.

Women’s 50 free

• World Record going into the 1988 Olympic year: Tamara Costache, 25.28
• World Record set at the Olympics: Yang Wenyi, 24.98
• World Record after 1992 Olympics: Yang Weniy, 24.79 (1992)

The World Record drop was less pronounced in the first four years here, falling by 1.9% from 1988 through 1992.

The finaling time from 1988 to 1992 dropped from 26.12 to 25.84. That is a less pronounced change from the men of 1.0%, though there are some heavy doping implications in this race that could skew that data. The women’s 100 free still dropped by less.

Women’s 800 Free Relay:

This one is an outlier among the three races. When the 1996 Olympic Games happened, the East German women of 1987 had the World Record at 7:55.47. That record wouldn’t be broken again until 2004, but again, dubious data because of the doping implications of the East German women. Relay records of any scale rarely last as long as that one did, and for that matter, while the 800 free relay was a new Olympic event, the 200 free that made up its parts wasn’t.

I suspect we’ll see this again with the latest round of new events. The mixed 400 medley relay records and depth probably won’t drop as quickly between the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, because all of those swimmers were already going to be on their Olympic teams for swimming those exact races.

The truth is that we won’t likely see a dramatic Olympic impact on World Records in any of these races. That men’s 800 swim by Zhang Lin, which was easily the highlight of his career, has felt like an outlier for years even among the outlier that is the concept of a ‘World Record.’ The same is true for Katie Ledecky, who is already so far ahead of any female distance swimmer in history that it already feels like it will be a generation or two before we see someone seriously attack her records.

So the key will be in depth – what times it takes to earn a medal, or an A-final swim at a major meet. That’s where we’re most likely to see the impact of these events at the Olympic level, at least immediately.